Tech Companies Coddled Their Employees. Now They're Firing Them

Two weeks or so before Elon Musk prevailed in his attempt to strike a deal to buy Twitter, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist and entrepreneur Keith Rabois tweeted a story from Musk’s startup days. Once, at Space Exploration Technologies Corp., Musk had noticed a group of interns milling around while they waited in a line for coffee.

To a normal chief executive officer, such a scene might have seemed, well, normal. But to Musk it was an affront to productivity. According to Rabois, who knows Musk from their days at PayPal, Musk responded by threatening to fire all the interns if it happened again, and had security cameras installed so that the company could monitor compliance.